Within
hours of the shooting at Columbine High School the first instinct of
some network producers was to exploit the tragedy to attack gun rights
advocates instead of holding the perpetrators responsible or focusing
the blame on lax parenting and inattentive school officials. While those
angles have received attention in the massive coverage, all the networks
served as one-sided conduits for the arguments of gun control advocates.

Promoting Suzann Wilson. While ABC and CBS managed to hold off,
temporarily, on the gun control preaching, within hours of the shooting
NBC Nightly News went to Suzann Wilson, the mother of a girl
killed 12 months ago at a school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, who is
now a gun control crusader. The night of the Colorado shooting NBC’s Ann
Thompson relayed her reaction, explaining: "Suzann has used her hurt and
anger to campaign for laws to hold gun owners responsible when children
use those weapons to hurt others, taking on gun rights advocates on the
front steps of the Arkansas Capitol." Thompson cut to Wilson yelling,
"This is not about the Second Amendment. This is about parents burying
children."

ABC and CBS picked up Wilson’s
crusade the next morning as CBS invited her onto This Morning.
She also appeared on Today. Over on ABC’s Good Morning America,
Diane Sawyer asked Janet Reno: "But we keep hearing over and over again
that even troubled kids could get access to help, without this sort of
incident, if they didn’t have access to guns first. Is there a gun
control measure that you think would actually help prevent a situation
like this?"

Too Many Guns the Problem. That night, on the April 21 World News
Tonight, Peter Jennings announced: "It is no surprise that this
became a big international story, and in the other nations headlines,
not for the first time, America is seen as a country which cannot
control violence committed with guns. In Japan today the headline was
‘How sick is the gun society?’"

On NBC’s Today, the
second morning after the shooting, Katie Couric pressed the Republican
Governor of Colorado, Bill Owens, about gun control: "A lot of people
are asking about the accessibility of guns. Have you wondered about that
yourself?" Owens pointed out that the killers had broken many laws on
the books already, but no network pursued that angle on the futility of
more gun restrictions.

CNN’s Judy Woodruff served as a
gun control advocate on the April 22 Inside Politics when she
interviewed Republican Senator Wayne Allard and Democratic Senator
Dianne Feinstein. She demanded Allard respond to Senator Feinstein’s
points about how the shooting shows the need for more controls, but
instead of challenging Feinstein with his retorts she tossed up
Feinstein’s own talking points for easy replies. Woodruff harangued
Allard: "Let me just begin by asking you to what extent do you think the
easy availability of guns was one of the main causes of what happened?"
And: "You voted in the last session of Congress to repeal the assault
weapons ban. Do you stand by that vote?"

NRA’s "Cruel Reminder." While the NRA shortened its annual
convention planned for Denver, that did nothing to dissuade the media’s
rancor. Using loaded language Peter Jennings, on the April 22 World
News Tonight, warned: "The gun lobby scaled its plans down, but it
may not have been enough."

Aaron Brown provided a full
report, starting with a soundbite from Denver Mayor Wellington Webb
urging that the convention be canceled. Brown noted that three bills
expanding gun rights for Coloradans had been dropped by the legislature
and aired a soundbite of state representative Doug Dean suggesting it
would have been a "slap in the face to those families to debate any kind
of gun legislation." Brown led into a soundbite by NRA President
Charlton Heston: "And the gun lobby’s leader drew criticism from what he
said to a TV interviewer yesterday." Heston made the point that even one
armed guard could have saved many lives and perhaps even prevented the
shooting. Brown picked up: "In fact there was an armed officer in the
school on Tuesday trying to do that." The Jefferson County Schools
Security Director, Howard Cornell, pointed out that the shooters were
engaged by the guard with a handgun.

However, Brown failed to draw
the obvious conclusions that a school of Columbine’s size required more
than one guard or that the guard’s cornering of the shooters may have
prevented even more deaths. Instead, Brown went to a soundbite from Bob
Walker of Handgun Control. Brown then concluded, "A pro-gun legislator,
the House Majority Leader, said the same thing to us today: that the
fear of the victims’ families testifying, re-living the tragedy, he
said, will keep legislators from even considering loosening gun laws for
many years to come."

The CBS Evening News
caught up with the anti-gun cause on Friday night, April 23. Reporter
Sandra Hughes, over a video of a NRA billboard advertising its
convention showing Charlton Heston holding a rifle, Hughes chastised:
"This National Rifle Association billboard is a cruel reminder for those
still grieving over the events in Littleton that next week the NRA is
coming to Denver, even though Mayor Wellington Webb asked the NRA to go
away."

After a soundbite from Webb,
Hughes continued: "It will only scale back its planned three-day
conference to a one day meeting. NRA President Charlton Heston refused
our request for an interview. A spokesman told CBS News, the NRA quote,
‘wants the community to bury their children’ before it will discuss gun
control. The Littleton massacre has galvanized the anti-gun movement
across the country." Hughes went on to detail gun control legislation in
California and allowed a gun store owner to say gun laws are not about
crime control but people control and then concluded, "Even in many
conservative states pro-gun legislation is being tabled and in Colorado
two bills long supported by the gun lobby were shut down days before
becoming law."

As the week came to a close
CBS’s Face the Nation brought aboard Colorado Governor Bill
Owens. Bob Schieffer demanded: "Governor, have you changed your mind now
about gun control laws? I know you favored the concealed weapons law
that was being debated out there, did you not?"

Schieffer and Gloria Borger
quizzed the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre about whether he favors allowing
teachers to "carry heat" and why he isn’t for holding adults criminally
responsible for their kids before they turned to Deputy Attorney General
Eric Holder. He got nicer treatment as Borger set him up: "Do you think
tougher gun laws could have prevented this?"

Not once in any of these
stories did reporters highlight statistics showing how passage of
concealed weapons laws, according to University of Chicago economist
John Lott, have reduced crime or that one of the Framer’s intents for
the Second Amendment was to grant citizens the ability to protect
themselves and loved ones from the criminally-minded like the crazed
murderers in Colorado.